


Shooting A Flower

by Bolkon_skies



Category: Natasha Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 - Malloy, Voyná i mir | War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Genre: Andrei survives and ruins everything, Canon obsession with the sky, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, as he is prone to do
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-08-06 13:04:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16388246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bolkon_skies/pseuds/Bolkon_skies
Summary: “Something broke,” Pierre whispered, “but Andrei, it was never supposed to be you.”





	1. Chapter 1

Andrei was silent.

Not that Pierre was worried. Andrei wasn’t much of a talkative person; in fact, Andrei was being himself when he was silent, thinking of undreamt dreams and dreamt ones, swirling around and around his head.

No, a silent Andrei was normal, but not a silent Andrei sleeping with his red brown or black coat, his pencil still in his hand, the fingers trailing before it fell on the desk with a thuck, and then a flutter of the eyelashes, then nothing. A silent Andrei was the norm, a sad one was not.

Something was wrong.

“My friend,” he started, not knowing what else to say. So much had happened ever since. Andrei moved his head deeper in his folded arms. “My friend,” and that was the only thing he managed to say.

Andrei, Pierre thought, was a great man. No one was a great man, and that was made him great. Andrei with his delicate hands, Andrei with his plain brown hair plastered behind his ears, Andrei trying to smile. A butterfly flapped his wings, and Andrei was suddenly in history books, in Ceasar’s _Confessions_ , in novels of centuries. Andrei was not an ordinary man, and now he was silent.

Pierre sat beside him, the chair grunted as he let his weight down. He had gained weight ever since, but Andrei had always insisted that he liked it, that he didn’t mind, that he should regulate his drinking, but not the cake. Andrei was a great man, Pierre knew. He laid his big hand on his friend’s shoulder. Andrei flinched, and stirred.

“I know you’re awake,” Pierre said.

A sigh. “I was reading,” a voice whispered. Andrei’s brown curls still the only thing in view.

“Now you’re not, are you.”

Andrei was silent. Pierre almost laughed. They were so old now, but were they still children? This nag will never stop to be funny. Like cats and dogs, like Russians and Poles. Their friendship was so much more and so much less than silence, that the empty gasps between them were almost too oppressing to be comfortable. Pierre shushed him, pushing him a little. Andrei still didn’t look up.

Pierre wasn’t that shy, sad man anymore. He smiled instead, wondered about the creases under his eyes, around them. “You’re acting like my younger and more vulnerable years: old and precocious.”

And Andrei looked up. His eyes rimmed red. Pierre felt his hand trembled by instinct, his fingers steading after a while. They were not children anymore, after all.

They were friends. There was nothing _just_ between being friends.

“This is not about The Countess,” Andrei said, not meeting his eyes. Some tears slid down his cheeks silently. Nothing elegant. Nothing even remotely beautiful. Sadness is always ugly. Everything was silent about Andrei: his rage, his grief. He wept like this, he laughed like this; he will die like this. Everything, between and around him, was silence.

“Why are you weeping?” Pierre asked stupidly, and Andrei closed his eyes immediately. “That won’t make me close mine, my friend.” He added, more stupidly so, because they were old, and they were friends.

“I know,” he grunted, and a tinge of red dusted his cheeks.

Pierre blushed too, feeling like his limbs were too big for his body. “Why are you weeping?” He asked again, because he was in Russia, because he was with his friend, because of all and nothing, and he loved him, he really did.

Andrei smiled, bitter and disheveled. “It’s the nineteenth century, haven’t you heard?”

Pierre let a smile at that. “The twentieth century will be better.”

“You used to say that,” he remarked, which meant: you would never say this now. Because past him and future him were the same, but Pierre in the present, Pierre in flesh and blood and gun wounds and Andrei’s friend, Pierre with a weight and a soul, Pierre was different, and Andrei knew it. Andrei knew everything.

Andrei, despite his silence and his grief and his never-ending everlasting love, knew everything, and closed his mouth, his lips, his eyes, and didn’t say anything more. He continued weeping.

“Something broke,” Pierre whispered, “but Andrei, it was never supposed to be you.”

And they hadn’t found each other yet, not really, but they were close. Pierre’s strong figure looming after Andrei’s. This was beauty, he thought, not the tears, not Andrei, but the distance and the fainting and radiant warm between them, a space he didn’t want to fall in or out. A space that was sacred, and that Andrei closed with his arm.

His arms— no, no, it was not his arms, they were hands, delicate hands, his long cold fingers on his cheeks, tingling his beard. And Pierre was right after all— Andrei never broke— it was Pierre who broke into million of pieces and looked at him with millions more. And it was beautiful, and it was enough.

Andrei wept on his shoulder, soft and silent and enough.

“It’s not,” Andrei said, “about The Countess.”

“I know.”

“It’s not about you,” he reassured him.

“It’s never about me,” Pierre agreed.

And Andrei continued to love in silence. He meant: I love you. He meant: I love her. He meant: This is about _me_ , this is about myself, death, and everything before.

“I am a difficult person,” Andrei said.

“You are.”

“What’s more to it?” He asked, his eyes sparkling with that same old glint, the never changing feature, and Pierre can see the sky, blue and immaculate. Andrei’s eyes were brown and cold and damp with tears.

“Nothing.” They shared a kiss, quick and not sweet. It was a swift gesture, a comforting one. Andrei whined into his mouth, and Pierre quickly pulled out, gasping for breath that was not his.

_Nothing_ , he said. Nothing, and just like that, he meant: I loved you before nothing came forth, and when nothing was behind us, where the unburden destiny laughed like a young man. They were both so old now.

“Crying makes nothing of it,” Pierre says, as quietly as he can. “Tell me, what happened?”

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

It was, to be totally fair, love at first sight.

He met Lisa that way. Petite Lise. On her cushion, her delicate arm on a delicate cloth. Her neck long and graceful, exactly the kind that would thrive on society, wine and other things that Andrei loved to be bored by. Lise was so beautifully plain that Andrei loved her, loved her as he would love another; with dry passion and forgiveness, toward him or her, he didn’t know. He loved her.

“I loved her,” he says to Pierre. These are the tears I should have shed at her funeral, now it’s too late, now it’s too late, leave me alone. “I really loved her.”

“Naturally,” Pierre says. _Why can’t you leave me alone?_

Under the unburdened destiny, Andrei laughed like the city, young and feeble. Saint-Petersburg and the snow, the whitening process of an canvas. “You don’t even know who I am talking about.”

“You are sentimental,” Pierre answers. He was afraid for a moment that he was being ironic. “If I liked you mad and powerless, I would have not liked you at all.”

And so Andrei messed with his fingers instead. Lise used to chide about his hands, said that they were too much that of a woman. _No bones between the knuckles, lily like, I wonder if war years would mould you into steal, you know? Rosemaries bleed and smell like metal, haven’t you hear from count Vensky? Disgusting._ Lise, Lisa. Pierre had different hands. Andrei touched them just to make sure that they were.

The maps of his lines were burring. This was not supposed to be a scene in a book, he thought. Books about battlefield were about honor, yet what can we possibly honor other than that dying hand on the stinking mud?

 _C’est un roman à fleur d’eau._ Water flood back with wine. That line in Homer. Colors that don’t matter insist only suspicion.

“Oh god,” Andrei breathed, he finally realized it, really, and years went by with this declaration for christ. “What have we done?”

And Andrei looked at the snow out the window, and thought, there will never, never be a night such as this; with whites on Pierre’s head, his gray speckled eyes rimmed with gold.

Pierre shook his head. “It’s the nineteen century, don’t you remember?”

“I do, I do,” he closed his eyes, thinking about snow cutting his cheek. “My friend, let’s stop talking about this. Do you want something to eat?”

Pierre stood there for awhile. He seemed intrigued. Andrei gestured him to sit, he complied. “Andrei. How’s Marya?”

“Marie is doing her work,” Andrei says in French, a tinge of accent flowing through the words like honey. “She is sick for awhile, but everyone is, in this time and age.”

“It’s winter.”

“It’s Russia.”

They shared a laugh. Andrei bought some cold tea that he knew none of them would drink. He sat down in a swift motion, and thought about Lise’s white arm on white pillow.

“I can hear your thoughts,” Pierre said. He threw his head aside. His black and white curls on the brown sofa. “The world’s destruction is in that mind.”

“And yours, full of gardens and flowers and unsung songs.”

Pierre stutters softly. The tea stifles cold. “You flatter me.”

Andrei drowned himself on his cushion, wishing he was fluid. Pierre stood again, coming forth. Look here, look here, here is a young man wanting to grow a beard. Humming.

“You know,” he said, “when I came back from the war, I hardly remembered you.”

Pierre was crouched, his back curling, like self-conscious people always do. “I’m being told that I make a lasting impression on people.”

“No, no— not your face, I remember your face,” Andrei said with dry smile. “It’s just— I thought I would be dead. And I thought, when I saw you and— your letter— I thought ‘yes, I have been dead for months and months’, and that you might be dead too one day. It happens to anyone. Lise dead to set me free. And I thought again: ‘He would die to make me feel what it is like to be dead.’ That’s how I remembered.”

“I don’t understand,” Pierre says, his hand on Andrei’s shoulder, featherlike. Why would he be so kind? Why must he weight so much and touch him so little?

“Well, kiss me then,” he laughed, no matter where he found the energy then. “We may all be dead tomorrow, haven’t you heard?”

And Pierre did. They kissed when he was in that white cushion. Maybe it was brown. His arms wrapped around him, guilt crushing him deep in his seat. There he bleeds and bleeds and bleeds like metal to rosemaries. Disgusting. He felt disgusting.

It was good that, at least, this was not about the Countess.

“Forgive me,” Andrei said to him, too loud for Pierre who was just near. His face a few breaths away from his. He felt breathless after kissing. He kissed Lise’s forehead, he felt like choking. “Forgive me, Pierre.”

It was selfish of his; he knew Pierre would always forgive him. It was wrong, he thought, he should have thanked him. Thanked him for sharing his pain, his loss, and for accepting silence as love, kiss as anger.

“I’m sorry,” he began, thought again, “I am trying,” he said instead, “not to think of her.”

And he was lying; he was trying to think of anything at all.

“She is sick too, Andrei,” Pierre said.

“Everyone is sick, in this day and age,” he repeated, not believing it himself.

The name would be too much to utter; her name was not Lise, her dress not Lise’s. Her smile was wide and childlike, and there were snow in her hair when she first talked to her friend about the moonlight. Lise was alone, or crowded by people he didn’t know. Lise was not her. She was not Lise, and neither was Pierre.

“Natasha,” Andrei said anyway, waiting for the train-wreck to hurt as much as anticipated. The guilt in his stomach chirped, stirred, turned into an army of old, crushing feathers, replacing his lungs with wet birds. “Tell me more about her.”

Pierre’s tired eyes bored into his. A line about Homer, he remembered. That swirling emotions in Pierre’s eyes, the churning guilt in his.

Pierre opened his mouth, ready to splutter out dark, dark, sea-wine; violet and blue.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That death verse is from _The Age of Innocence_ \- because rich people can’t seem to run out of books about them.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t know if I’ll continue this, all I know is that _I can’t stop._

 

Their kiss was repulsive no more than it was desperate.

Pierre had never kissed someone like this before; felt like he never even touched their lips, felt nothing but the length of breaths in between, felt that Andrei was Leander drowning, dawning in the river. But Pierre was never a river. So what was he drowning into?

The answer was stupidly clear, and Andrei said her name once, and never said it again for the rest of the evening.

There was no one else. We have been there before. Andrei, Pierre thought, never knew we have been there before. The house was silent after his words. He suspected that it always had.

“I told you before, she is ill.”

“I rejected her.”

“ _She_ ,” he said with some regret; that poor, poor girl, “rejected you.”

He left the house, after that. Andrei had looked at him with the same proud, cold eyes, but he almost died; and dead eyes were always sad. Pierre’s fingers twitched, the same feeling kept rushing back to him, that urge to forgive when he saw the Countess, and then this urge to embrace when Andrei lifted his sad, sad eyes to him.

 _I loved_ , he thought. _So why can’t I hate?_

That night was covered in snow, cold and unforgiving. There had always been nothing even remotely romantic in scenery like this; someone ought to be shoot here, and even then it could not wipe out the plain, bare atmosphere of snow. Its blood can make blush the ground, but never touch the people here: covered in animal fur, its red already dry and soulless and white.

He hadn’t saw anyone he knew in particular; to say Pierre seemed to have retreated from society was no less true than the fact people had stopped to visit him. They had been old, after all. Wrinkles had replaced whatever fright, scares from the war; its memory kept on between the creases, somewhere ahead of them. The war was not over.

He thought about Hélène, for a while, and the weight of a paperweight and je t’aime. It was the fashion of the time, using the enemy’s words to liken it to another. Hélène and Napoléon, only one consonant less than the other.

And so he walked, like old men do, thinking of the past and try very hard not to live for it. The steps crush the snow like trumping march, like making love. It was about letting yourself heard in a snowstorm, it was not hard.

Going to the Rostov house was a much more difficult path than he first intended. After all, he didn’t have anywhere else to go. The countess was ill, he knew.

“Pyotr!”

And for a moment he thought he’d heard Natasha. Natasha and her cheerful and singing voice, her deep, grave sound. He thought about her crying, her eyes drying to the cold, cold snow. But it was not her, that voice sounded too breathless and awed. It was Andrei, disheveled and his coats barely put together, the white of his shirt opening; his hair painted white.

Pierre was never a painter, but Andrei was that bristled white, waiting to be made whole by hand, with colors on their thumbs.

“Pierre,” Andrei whittles him, the concept of romanticism itself. He breathes out clouds. That snow cannot possibly mean love. “Pierre, you forgot.”

“I forgot what?”

Andrei opened his mouth, then closed them in frustration. He rushed his hand to his hair, looking ready to pull it off.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what has gotten in me—“

“I forgot what?”

“I—“

“Andryusha.”

Andrei grunted, a noise of an animal hurt by some good-intended arrow. “It’s _me_ ,” he admits, mumbling. “Bring me somewhere, I can’t stay in that damn place. Take me somewhere, Pierre.”

Pierre was silent for a while, then, in a moment of terrible irony, he laughed. “Me.”

“ _You_ , Pierre.”

“It’s funny.”

Andrei frowned, his breath hitched in his breathless stance. “There’s nothing funny for me.”

“No,” Pierre laughs silently, tears reaching his eyes, blurring his glasses. “No, no. You’re asking me to take you away.”

Andrei flinched, his eyes looking up. Andrei never looked down. “I’m sorry.”

“Ah, for god’s sake! You’re getting it all wrong, my friend.” He says, finally crying. “You are telling me to engage in an elopement.”

Andrei’s jaw hardened. He clenched his mouth tightly, as if in a great pain. “It wasn’t that.”

Pierre shifted his weight. The weight of careless words. “Pardon me- it was only in jest. I am being mean.”

“You’re never mean,” he said, and all was forgiven. “That is your biggest flaw.”

Andrei was, at that moment, old. The sharp contrast of the moonlight to his cheeks, cutting. His beard stubs clear and jarring. And yet his eyes were just like hers, sad, alive, young.

“Let’s go home,” Pierre said.

“Away,” Andrei supplied.

“Away,” Pierre promised.

Pierre knew, and Andrei too. They will go to an empty estate, somewhere between the lake and the capital and sleep there, because they can do that in the night. In the morning, they will wake up in each other’s arms, or in separate beds, with tea or coffee or water from the morning services. They would know that none of them had slept, with their eyes glasses and their breaths stutters. They will know, and yet they beat on.

They walked along Saint-Petersburg in silence, the slow drags of the carriages, the snow slowly dawning on them, ugly and way, way too cold. They know, really, Andrei knew everything, ahead and before them.

It was cold, and their cheeks were flushed. _It happens to me all over again_ , Pierre thought. _He happens to me all over again._

And the moon was as beautiful and unwavering and as still.

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Am I using Tolstoy’s two-characters-conscience dilemma for fanfiction purposes? You bet I am.

 

“Have it ever occurred to you,” he said, “that we are one and the same person?”

They were finally awake, sitting on a sofa that was too large for two, both of them on the verge of it. Last night happened too quickly; Andrei fell asleep the moment when they reached Pierre’s place, Andrei would choose to fall asleep over anything else, especially with friends. Pierre was one of his oldest friends. It was a rare thing, having friends that you trust enough to fall into them, trust them enough to fall out of it, and knew they wouldn't mind. Because they were friends.

But now they were sitting on the edge of whatever universes they have fallen out of, and Andrei was tired, his hands curling around a cup of black coffee. They both enjoyed music, he and Pierre. He was making music with his hands, tic tack, tic tack. Voilà; Mozart.

And Pierre’s eyes were on his coffee cup, or perhaps his hands. He tightened them by reflex. Music stopped. “You mean that we’re alike.”

“No,” Andrei said, suddenly remembering that they were having a conversation. He thought about the time of the Greeks, where he would hold arrows instead of coffee, lances instead of muskets. “I meant that it is a pity that I am not you.”

“But-“ Pierre said clumsily, his words tripping and a wild red spot on his cheek. “But Andrei. You’re an accomplished man- you do not need to refer to my life as a success, I know what it has come too, don’t coo me.”

“That’s not what I meant neither,” he said, growing frustrated, yet he knew his face was nonchalant. How can you not lie when your face cannot do enough to betray you? “I meant that we’re one man. When you’re away- pieces of me are gone, and thus this uncomplicated feeling of loss. But now that you’re here- Pierre, one complete man can do so much, and for too long I think I forgot how to desire desires.”

“The natural consequence of boredom,” Pierre amended, his face pale.

“It’s difficult to feel boredom when it is only the lack of love.” Natasha dancing at the ball: you should marry her, Andrei. She is such a nice girl. Her white dress and small hands- did you loved her when you first met?

Yes, he thought, taking a sip of coffee. Yes. Pierre remained silent. “Yes,” he said. “I know what you’re thinking, my friend. But I am not mad, it’s not about her.”

When he was little and frail and very, very young, his father hit him when trying to find his glasses. He was not in need of one, and to this day Andrei just assumes that he did that only to hit him. He finally felt like his father now.

“What are you trying to say? You’re being very insistent,” Pierre said, smiling shyly, he added, “Andrei, we cannot be here forever.”

“Am I being cruel to ask you to stay?” He breathed out some white puffs of heat on top of his mug. Being metaphorical only seem to work in novels long enough to live a life. “Because that’s what I am asking.”

Pierre blinked, his head tilted to a side. His beard was trimmed in a way where we can still see the marks. Andrei suspected that he did his morning toilette himself.

“I am not going anywhere,” Pierre said.

“I am not asking you to go,” Andrei sighed. “I am asking you to stay with me.”

“I have nowhere to go,” Pierre rectified, and Andrei felt relief washed over him, a sort of tender nostalgia installed over them.

There was a time when Andrei was enchanted by life, and by looking over Pierre’s speckled eyes, he thought he still was, as he always wanted, just a little subtler, a little quieter.

“I loved you once,” Andrei said in a moment between fatigue and dreams, as he was falling in and out of consciousness. Some truths are best said that way.

And from the slow call of morning exhaustion, he thought he’d heard something. Something like a declaration of love, but the tone of it an eulogy, it was fitting, he thought, as everything ends with love.

“Once is never enough,” he whispered, meant it, and fell asleep for a moment as the fingers kept treading on his hair, soft, unyielding.

He was reminded of courtesy when that hand stopped at his cheek. Those bourgeois manners he something wished he possessed. His eyes flair wide open, meeting Pierre’s. The latter smiled.

“What now?” Pierre asked.

“Stay for a moment, my friend,” he said. The coffee was emptied as he swallowed thick, black drops. The bitterness stayed. “What do you have to lose?”

Pierre didn’t answer. Instead, he asked, “You said you loved me once.”

“Did I,” he said, not intending for it be a question.

“You have discussed with me the matters of nature and death, Andrei, but never love.”

“I told you it’s not about her,” Andrei bit out, and realized his mistake. Nobody mentioned Natasha.

“It’s never about her,” Pierre said, a little red himself. “But she is a good woman, Andrei, and she is young. Have you seen her face? She was crying from all those sleepless nights. Her eyes were red and sore, and I pity her, Andrei, I really do.”

Silence. Mozart dying behind his fingers.

“I’m sorry,” Pierre said. And oh- _oh_. It was suddenly clear and it made so, so much sense. Andrei stood, his hands on his hair. He felt like laughing. He felt like hitting his head, to kiss her, to kiss him again. He felt so much, but most of all he felt like being disgusted at himself for feeling.

“You love her,” Andrei said, and he shouldn’t be crying, really. Where were the laughs? “Of course, of course- you love her. Everybody loves her.”

Pierre didn’t laugh neither. “Andrei-“

“Listen, my friend, I’m not blaming you,” Andrei tried laughing, it came out dry. He tried again. “My friend, my friend- it’s alright. I have been away. I was not there. I am not a jealous man- I am grateful- that is the word, yes- I am grateful that you’re here because of her. You’re trying to make me forgive her, it’s alright. Really, it is. It is-“

“Andrei,” Pierre said, “You said you loved me once.”

His breaths quickened, because if Pierre was here for her, then who can Andrei be there for, then? “Yes,” he said.

“Then believe me now when I say that I cherish you as a friend, and will love you so. The Countess is only a poor woman deprived of reason, as we all do, in a moment of foolishness. She is young, and we’re old. We must forgive the youth. You must understand that.”

“It is alright,” Andrei said. “Everyone is free to love her.”

“Then I must be free to pity her as well,” Pierre said softly. “Come, let’s not go further. I am sorry to have brought this up in the first place.”

“It’s alright,” he said again. He store up all that anger and frustration deep inside him, her silhouette still young and so, so bright, and choose to look at the moon instead. Pierre shone splendidly.

“Breathe a little,” Pierre ordered. Andrei did, and again, and again. He thought: there will never be a day like this, with breaths to take and moon to look in the daylight.

Then he breathed a little more.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Talk War and Peace to me please


End file.
